City on Fire (Metropolitan 2)

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Tomorrow, and after,” Constantine says, “I am available to you. I hope to see you as soon as you can find the time.”

  Tomorrow, Aiah thinks, if this all goes wrong, she may be dead or hiding from Taikoen. If she is hiding, Constantine will have to decide between Aiah and Taikoen, could not keep them both, might decide that he loved her and turn against his monster.

  For a wild, irrational minute she hopes that the attempt will fail, that this affirmation will come to pass.

  The moment fades. She knows what Constantine is, what truly moves his heart.... It is not tender affections that are important to him, but his dreams, realizing in stone and steel the glorious phantasm city that, all his life, he has constructed in his mind.

  “I hope I will see you as well,” she says. If she is still alive.

  “Remember,” Constantine says, voice kind and confident now, certain that he has won her, “remember that in less than four months’ time we have an appointment beyond the Shield. We will change the world together.”

  “I hope so,” Aiah says.

  “I know we will.” Smoothly. Anger flares darkly in Aiah, anger at the cream in Constantine’s voice, at his confidence, his assumptions that she will remain his instrument forever.

  She will show him otherwise, she thinks. He has made her a power, but she will not be the Apprentice for all time; the Golden Lady lives by other rules, she must have new arrangements, a new disposition.

  “I have to go,” she says. “I’ll talk to you when I can.”

  “I hope it will be soon,” Constantine says.

  Soon, Aiah thinks. Soon I will have solved your greatest problem for you.

  And then, as she returns the headset to its hook, she thinks, I wonder if you will be grateful.

  “GOLDEN LADY SOCIETY” BANNED IN JABZI

  “SUBVERSIVE THOUGHT” CONDEMNED BY SECURITY CHIEF

  The sanctuary of the Dreaming Sisters stands gray beneath its gleaming copper dome, a maze within a maze. Aiah waits telepresent across Cold Canal, her PMDS, which turns out to be the plasm-modulation detecting sensorium, prepared to venture into the ASoO, the assumed site of operations. Aratha had called plasm into the small PED operations room, had a ball of bright reality dancing on her fingertips; she pulsed modulations through it, complex and shimmering patterns, and let the others tune their perceptions to it, distinguish it from a ball of undifferentiated plasm she was holding on the palm of her other hand.

  Thus they hope to detect Taikoen once he is free of his mortal mask. If, of course, Taikoen is not some different modulation altogether, if he is not something entirely other than what they have been led to believe.

  Ministry workers have cut the plasm mains around the sisters’ building, and once their little plasm accumulator is empty, there will be nothing more. It is hoped that Taikoen, battered by his pursuers, will be trapped in the plasm well as it drains, and die.

  “The aerial tram is coming into Seahorse Station.” Alfeg’s voice, echoing through Aiah’s mind from the operations center. Alfeg has been following Refiq all day. Refiq had picked the fastest mode of transportation available for crossing the city, the swift-flying trams.

  Aiah’s sensorium can see the swaying tram car sliding into its bay atop the silver tower, sees through windows the tiny figures crowding the exits.

  Soon.

  Aiah shifts her weight in her chair, t-grip held lightly in a damp palm. The song of plasm in her veins is louder than the snarl of the Adrenaline Monster, than her own doubts. She is the Golden Lady again, invincible, a perfect warrior, all reality at her call.

  “Refiq’s taking a water taxi from the station,” Alfeg reports.

  “Who’s that?” Khorsa’s voice, a little excited. “Over the temple— look!”

  Aiah looks with ectomorphic eyes configured to see plasm, and beneath a sky flaming with adverts sees someone’s anima just hanging above the sisters’ copper dome. As if someone telepresent is gazing down at the neighborhood, or perhaps trying to work out the nature of the complex carvings on the Dreaming Sisters’ refuge.

  “Is that one of ours?” Aiah asks, and receives only negatives from the people around her.

  “Khorsa,” she orders, “backtrack the sourceline. See if it’s local.”

  Khorsa flies off from her perch over Cold Canal, a silver track across the sky. “Not from the district,” she reports. “The sourceline tracks a good many radii to the southeast. Do you want me to follow it all the way to its origin?”

  “No.” Aiah considers. She doesn’t want a bystander hovering nearby, no matter who he might be. Taikoen might well attack him, thinking him an enemy or simply not caring, and then the stranger could end up in some padded room, mind scorched to madness by the encounter.

  “No,” she repeats, “I want you to wait where you are and cut the stranger’s sourceline as soon as the operation commences. Then return to the operations site and join the rest of us, ne?”

  “Da.”

  “Taxi turning into Cold Canal,” reports Alfeg.

  Aiah can see it, a dingy white motorboat with a cracked windscreen.

  “Stand by,” she says.

  The taxi motors to the sisters’ rusting pier. Refiq, Aiah thinks, looks like hell: he leans heavily on the gunwale, one hand swaying over the bright green water. His powerful body rolls listlessly with the waves, and the face beneath the shock of black hair is pale and slack, eyes wide and staring at nothing. For a moment Aiah wonders if he is already dead.

  The little gray embryo cabman hops over Refiq’s outstretched legs to tie up the cab, and then Refiq rises slowly to his feet, takes several shuffling steps toward the cabman, pays him, and accepts the little fellow’s help getting to the pier.

  Taikoen has nearly worn this body out. Refiq crosses the pier with quick tottering steps, like a man recovering from a stroke, and then takes his time climbing the metal stair to the paved area in front of the Dreaming Sisters’ retreat.

  The cabman casts off and motors away. He moves fast, not bothering to look for customers in this battered neighborhood.

  Refiq reaches the top of the stair and takes a few steps into the plaza. Once there he pauses and looks with a strange resignation at the mass of carved stone.

  And then Aiah’s heart leaps into her throat as the stranger, the telepresent stranger hovering over the copper dome, descends on his plasm tether toward Refiq.

  “What’s he doing?” Alfeg’s startled voice.

  Refiq raises his ravaged face, as if he senses the approach of the stranger, and then the telepresent stranger touches him, coming into contact as if for communication.

  Constantine, Aiah realizes. He is here to help Refiq leave this wrecked body and claim another one.

  No time to lose.

  “Clever Karlo!” Aiah shouts, the signal agreed upon.

  And Aratha, from her hiding place across the canal, fires a silver arrow of plasm-energy straight through Refiq’s heart. It’s the kind of work she is used to. Aiah wanted to do it herself, wanted to take the responsibility of killing Refiq’s empty shell, but she was afraid that she’d hesitate, or do it wrong, and finally gave in to Aratha’s calm insistence.

  Refiq gives a cry and flings out his arms, shot in the back by a blast of pure reality. Other shots are already on their way, propelled by the readier reflexes of the military mages. Aiah forms and flings her own bolt, blasting a body already dead, the force of her angry fire lifting the corpse from the stone pathway where it had crumpled. But something is already rising from Refiq’s shattered shell, a kind of buzzing silver madness, insubstantial but infused with dire purpose, like a swarm of scintillating bees, and the next bolt, fired by one of Aratha’s military mages, hits it dead on, spraying bits of silver chaff, Taikoen’s strange essence, through the air.... Another bolt strikes, fired from another quarter. Some bits of the hanged man spark off into nowhere, and others, still under his command, loop back to rejoin his form.

  But Constantine is reacti
ng, moving with his usual uncommon swiftness and readiness. His anima grows, forms a great amorphous shield that flies across the canal toward the attackers, trying to scoop up the plasm bolts....Aiah ducks around the shield, preparing another attack, but the shield suddenly extends itself in her direction and she contacts it, striking it with a kind of mental concussion that, back in the Palace, sends her bolt upright in her padded ops-room chair. In a brief instant of mental contact she can feel Constantine’s recognition of her, his profound surprise....

  And then he’s gone, vanished completely— Khorsa has cut his sourceline.

  Aiah looks to the hanged man, finds him unmoved, launches her bolt of fire. Taikoen is either stunned or is having difficulty disentangling his essence from Refiq’s remains. Hit him! Hit him! Hit him! Aiah can’t tell whether she’s shouting the words out loud or not.

  It is safer to attack this way, Aratha’s manual suggests. Blast Taikoen from a distance, fire discrete bolts and not a steady stream of plasm that he could turn against its user.

  A half-dozen bolts blaze into Taikoen. His scintillating body scatters, loops, reforms. Once free of Refiq he will not be able to survive for long without plasm. He floats away from Refiq, lets the blasts drive him toward the sisters’ building, and then, with a sinuous, purposeful little twist of his form, Taikoen slides through the image on the huge door, Enters the Gateway, enters the maze that waits for him....

  Aiah pursues, spreading phantom arms wide as she flies across Cold Canal at the speed of thought, fast as one of her plasm bullets. There is a strange high-pitched drone humming somewhere in her senses, and she realizes it’s Dr. Romus, a kind of buzzing battle-cry he’s uttering unconsciously as he flies to the attack. Aiah dives through the doorway— the sisters’ building is transparent to plasm, completely unshielded— and there is one of the Dreaming Sisters on her couch, not Whore but someone Aiah doesn’t know, lying with eyes closed and plasm contact in her mouth, and the sister has lifted a hand to point down the rightmost of the two corridors.... Aiah flies in that direction, catches bits of Taikoen’s form speeding along the floor, as if he is in the process of diving into a plasm main just below the surface of the flags. Aiah gives a yelp of triumph and fires a bolt, sees bits of Taikoen flare up and scatter like sparks. Another of Aiah’s team fires a bolt— and Taikoen submerges completely, like a dolphin diving beneath the surface of the sea.

  There are Dreaming Sisters in all the alcoves, and with a shiver at their strange knowing Aiah sees that each has raised a languid arm, fingers pointing down the corridor, directing Aiah and the others to their prey. The corridor loops right and down and then branches, but Aiah follows the sisters’ drowsing fingers, all lazily pointing at one spot in the wall, a carved trompe l’oeil of Rohder.

  Aiah gathers herself and punches through the image, briefly feeling the chill of the stone around her— and then there is Taikoen, a figure hunched over one of the Dreaming Sisters, the violence already over, a spray of blood dripping down the alcove wall and the sister’s eyes a staring witness to her final terror. In her last instant, torn from her unearthly dreaming and her inhuman serenity, she had become human again, pain and raw emotion plain on her face.

  But more eerie than this are the sisters in the other alcoves, all lying in repose, eyes closed in dream, minds far removed from the grisly scene save for the uplifted arms, the fingers pointing in silent, certain accusation, toward the guilty thief who has stolen their sister’s life.

  Taikoen has taken the copper contact from the sister’s slack mouth; he is trying to take plasm. Aiah gathers energy, as if filling her lungs with air, and then flings the power at the hanged man, a ball of destruction. The hanged man shudders— the fury of the bolt splatters stone along the corridor, sets afire the dead sister’s mattress. Other animas fly into the corridor, surround Taikoen with a storm of fire. But he’s using the dead sister’s plasm now, creating a bubble shield that surrounds him. The bolts ricochet off the shield, strike sparks and splinter shards from the stone walls.

  “Khorsa!” Aiah barks. “Alfeg! Protect the sisters! The rest of you— keep hitting him!”

  The more plasm they fire at the hanged man, Aiah assumes, the faster he’ll use up his available supply. She wonders why he’s making a stand here, why he doesn’t simply dive into the nearest plasm main and run.

  Maybe, she thinks, the sisters are making the plasm mains uncomfortable for him.

  She fires bolt after bolt. The bubble shield spins, lurches, blazes with strange color. And then frost shivers up her veins at the sound of Taikoen’s insinuating voice.

  “You, is it, girl-mage? Do you desire death so absolutely? I will oblige, young one....”

  He recognizes me, she thinks in sudden terror; if this doesn’t work I’m dead. But the burning plasm in her veins provides an answer, draws Aiah’s lips back in a snarl. “Your death is overdue, creature. And it is the Golden Lady who brings it.”

  She doesn’t know whether he hears her or not, whether she is projecting the words to him or just speaking them aloud in the Operations Room, but he acts as if he hears. Taikoen and the plasm-shield make a lunge, straight for Aiah’s anima, and she feels a sudden shock of contact, the touch of the thing’s cold, immortal mind, its dread intention, and knows its goal is to conquer her, nullify her, drive her mind into mad byways and seize her plasm for his own.

  And as his mind presses upon hers she catches a glimpse of the way he sees things, the world bent and distorted, plasm the focus of the whole world, all other reality twisted toward it, leaning inward, strangely curved and warped, the colors shimmering in odd spectra, some strangely alive, imbued with a strange purpose... and what purpose could a color have...?

  It is fear that saves her, a pure reflex that sends the plasm blasting from her into Taikoen, driving the ice from her in a spray of burning plasm fire. Molten metal sings in her veins. There is a roar of thwarted anger, a kind of snarl, and then the hanged man’s body twists again, a strange little Möbius shiver, and vanishes into the wall, into the building’s plasm conduits.

  Aiah pauses— in the Operations Room she is aware of sweat pouring down her neck, of her heart hammering her ribs— and she turns her focus to the Dreaming Sisters, to the outstretched, pointing arms that seem to bridge the world of dreaming and not-dreaming....

  The arms sway like compass needles, pointing up and right, and Aiah flies, penetrating the arched ceiling to the story above; and here the sisters’ arms are level, all pointing deeper into the building, and Aiah follows them, flying through walls and ceilings, through alcoves and images, penetrating as if entering a mirror her own image in The Apprentice, Sorya’s scornful gaze in The Shadow, Rohder’s thoughtful Mage. Contact with Taikoen’s mind seems to have deranged her perception in some way: the corridors and images seem warped, twisted, looming toward her as if threatening. She tries to ignore the effect, the distorted and ominous images, and concentrate only on her blazing pursuit.

  She realizes as she flies that she is wearing the Golden Lady anima, the featureless icon of blazing gold.... She can’t remember willing this, and wonders how long she has borne this form, whether she automatically slipped into it when she began to fly or perhaps took it on when she invoked the Golden Lady’s name, when she shouted at Taikoen in her plasm-pride.

  She passes through a wall and finds herself in the dome room, sees Shieldlight passing through the slits in the dome to illuminate the gleaming plasm accumulator, copper and black ceramic behind its carved screen. A dreaming sister lies dead atop a control panel, blood spattering the dials and switches, the sight all the more horrible in Aiah’s distorted perceptions. Taikoen shimmers toward the accumulator, disappears into it before Aiah can launch a plasm blast. Other animas fly into the room, hover about the accumulator like a swarm of angry insects.

  It is Taikoen’s last refuge. Plasm was flowing in the mains, and flowing only in one direction, from the accumulator to the sisters’ contacts. Taikoen fled upstream, as it w
ere, to the source of the plasm. Perhaps he’d expected to find a plasm main that would carry him away, allow him to merge with Caraqui’s vast plasm well and vanish; but instead he’d found only a dead end, trapped himself here. He can still run, but if he does he will have to flee into a plasm conduit with less plasm than he has access to now, and he will find himself weaker and still lost, still caught in the sisters’ maze.

  The dreaming sister Order of Eternity lies on a couch on the other side of the circular room. She sits upright, opens her eyes.

  “Hit him from all sides,” Aiah says. “Destroy the accumulator and he has nowhere to run. Ready... on my command.”

  “No.” Order of Eternity raises a hand. Her words are slurred by the plasm contact still in her mouth. “It is our turn. We will end it.”

  Aiah hesitates. And then the dome room, the Sisters’ stony refuge, the world itself, seems to undergo a shift, a transformation. Aiah sees everything as through a pulsing wave, and she feels herself uplifted, as if buoyed up by a surge of the sea. There is a moment in which all seems to hang suspended.... Aiah thinks wildly of the “slip” in the Barkazil dance, a hesitation between beats.

  The world falls into place again, somehow more intense than before, more real. Aiah gazes at the dead sister, and recognizes the woman she knows as Inaction. The dead woman stares at her, a horrified expression that says, I was not expecting this.

  The world shivers again to another pulse of... of what? Reality is changing, Aiah thinks, the pace of her thoughts fervid, they are changing the world.

  “What is going on?” Khorsa wonders aloud in the breathless moment that follows, like a pause before the clapper strikes the bell.

  Another pulse, another endless moment in which the world changes. Aiah feels herself buoyed up by a wave of gentle power. A cry of wonder parts her lips. The figures on the screen seem to move, shift, engage with one another in a solemn dance, the world-dance that Aiah has seen beyond the Shield, the dance of eternity, the dance of the Woman who is the Moon.